Melting Wax and Warming Hearts: Heartstopper, Scented Candles, and Bookish Social Media1.

A flourishing market in literary-scented candles offers olfactory bookish experiences has received little attention from scholars. Whilst the literature on bookishness has not considered candles, they provide a useful perspective from which to consider our relationship to books. Bookish candles transcend the purely olfactory, as their use is often in photographs alongside books, as part of bookish social media culture. I consider how bookish candles, scented and otherwise, through four dynamics: attentiveness to the materiality of books, direct evocation of literary aspects with textual support, expansion beyond the text, and more creative and abstract responses. I draw on notions of affective bibliography, as well as ideas of diegetic and non-diegetic sound from film studies, and argue for a wider bibliography drawing on transmedia approaches to understand this aspect of print culture. I explore the YA phenomenon of Heartstopper through a consideration of candles inspired by Heartstopper sold on Etsy, and made and shared by users on TikTok as examples of bibliographic practices and bibliographical, which not only tell us about what books mean to their owners, but also add an olfactory dimension to our understanding of bookish objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]